The lower levels drew out some initial buying however the market didn’t bounce by much and the morning was spent consolidating the 17.40’s, though tellingly there was no sign of any aggressive spec selling to test downside support. Despite the macro showing as a sea of green there was no apparent interest in building upon our token gains until the afternoon when the arrival of some additional spec interest took prices back up through the range. Having accelerated ahead to the 17.80 area a little more selling started to emerge to limit the progress being made, though such was the persistence of buyers that we continued to push on through which led to another rally to 17.99. As always, the strength brought positivity back to the spreads with March/May’23 widening out to 0.77 points, though that proved to be as far as the market could muster with 18.00 again providing a ceiling. There was some position squaring late i9n the day to leave March’23 shy of the highs at 17.91 going out, the question now being whether we can escape the range higher having pushed so hard today to set things up.
The market picked up some consumer pricing this morning which underpinned prices and ensured that we remained comfortably above recent lows and within the range. Spread volume proved to be as dismal as the outright activity through the morning with the increasingly narrow range suggesting we could see a very quiet session despite a positive macro environment. The early part of the afternoon saw this scenario change as some more buying filtered in to bring prices up through the $520’s, and this in turn triggered a few small buy stops which propelled through a vacuum to trade at $534.00. Such pace cannot be maintained however a good effort was made to maintain the highs, holding positively to extend the high to $535.00 and remain near to this level as we reached the closing stages. There was some volatility over the final 30 minutes as position squaring was followed by defensive buying, leaving a positive settlement at $533.10 as we continue to look for a way out of the recent range.